Wealthy people are wealthy because of their careful life choices, hard work and determination. They are to be lauded for their contributions to our society. Their wealth proves that they have been productive to the greater good of the community. Financial success--while not perfectly accurate--is a great way to measure one's virtues as a human being.

The poor, and those who struggle financially are lazy and expect others to pay their way. They feel entitled. They care only about themselves and don't want to work--but they want nice things. They are the cause of all our current financial problems because they felt entitled to own houses they couldn't afford.

Wealthy people are wealthy because of their careful life choices, hard work and determination. They are to be lauded for their contributions to our society. Their wealth proves that they have been productive to the greater good of the community. Financial success--while not perfectly accurate--is a great way to measure one's virtues as a human being.

The poor, and those who struggle financially are lazy and expect others to pay their way. They feel entitled. They care only about themselves and don't want to work--but they want nice things. They are the cause of all our current financial problems because they felt entitled to own houses they couldn't afford.

Sincerely,

Dennis

Hi Dennis,

I don't agree with your statement like i would not agree to a statement that the wealthy are greedy and make their money on the backs of the poor and the poor are noble because they don't do the mean things that the rich do to get ahead.

Now you can find some cases to support either from time to time but rule 1 in sociology is case study makes poor law.

The bigger question is, is it the role of government to cancel out inequity? If so to what degree? Can any government of a large dynamic country like ours afford it?

I believe we are all Gods children and he sees us all equally. Outside of my spirituality I sometimes have to compete within my society for the resources to live my life. Charity or action that one takes to take care of his fellow man are individual and come from the heart and even with my so called "harden muscled heart" I try my best to reach out to others to help when i can.

We are born of different sizes, health and circumstances and our role in our lives is to do the best we can playing those cards.

Understanding and compassion isn't going to pay children's medical bills, particularly the kind you and your ilk seem to practice. Currently, it's estimated that 50 million Americans are without health insurance and the number is rising quickly. Of course, considering the income inequality in our country and the number of people living below the poverty line, it's no surprise that there are so many uninsured.

It's no surprise that your heart muscles hardened, I'm just surprised you had any in the first place.

Wow, Because someones disagrees with you they have a hard heart, and he and his "ilk" are the cause of the problem? Why don't you and your "ilk" start your own fund so that those willing to pay so much extra in taxes can then pay for the healthcare of those others in your own group. Put your money where your mouth is. Why don't you sponsor someone elses healthcare costs? It's up to you, you can use your money for whatever you want, but for you to attack someone because they believe people are responsible for themselves.....Seems like you may have the hard heart.

I want to be a nice guy.
It took me almost 60 years to figure out how.

I am inviting all of you to my funeral.
Bring this business card with you (cut this out and put it in your wallet).
When you get to the funeral, please check one box only and drop it in the collection plate.

A lot of people have told me I should be in business and now I can explain my problem.
If I became a plumber and had a plumbing license and a plumberís shop and a plumberís van and you called the plumber (me) and I came and fixed your plumbing...

I like the way we have the fire department set up. I pay taxes (as does everybody else in town), and if there's a fire, the local fire department comes and puts it out. (Actually, most of the time there's no fire, and they show up to take people to the hospital in the ambulance, but that's good, too.) If you want to get reimbursed for stuff damaged in a fire, you buy fire insurance from an insurance company, but that's a separate issue, it doesn't have anything to do with putting out the fire. I've never used the services of my own local fire department.

Here's another way we could run the fire department, which I would not like.

There are a bunch of fire departments (mostly private companies). If you live in a big apartment building, or a subdivision, then you can get group firefighting insurance, and the policy will have a contract with one of the fire departments to come and put it out. (If you have a car fire somewhere outside of town, then some fire department there will probably put it out, but there will be a lot of paperwork.) If your house in on fire and you call the wrong fire department, they either won't show up, or they'll show up and you'll have to pay them yourself. If you own a house that is not part of a subdivision, good luck finding a company that will sell you firefighting insurance. They'll figure that you wouldn't want it unless your house was for some reason at a high risk of fire, and thus will charge you extremely high premiums. Or they'll sell you a policy that has a deductible that's above the typical cost of putting out a fire. If you don't have insurance, you may be able to get a fire department to show up and give you a couple of fire extinguishers.

(I am aware that there are some locales in the USA that have a separate levy for the fire department, and that there are cases where the fire department showed up and watched someone's house burn down because they were late with the payment. I find this appalling.)_________________H4 + most skills
WW U2 145, WW UltraSport 147, WW Falcon2 170, PacAir Vision Mark IV 17
My HG wiki profile and my flying blog

JJ your post described an emergency type service, (i.e. house is burning), are you aware that any hospital that was built with the help of Federal funds must take all comers in emergent care?

Most of the hospitals and just about all of the big research hospitals qualify for that obligation. I mentioned in a past post that in a private room right next to me was a young women who was on welfare receiving the same care and transplant services as i was.

All you need to do is go to a busy ER on a Friday night in major city and you will see tons of care delivered to sew up knife wounds and bullet holes from some of our uninsured citizens.

So I appreciate your analogy but it isn't relevant to the subject of this thread.

Not many people understand the complexity of health care delivery. There are many sides of the equation. Health care patients, Care Providers, Administration, insurance and cost control, and facility management to name the major considerations.

After considering these complex issues and looking at the talent base in Washington I don't understand why anyone and I mean ANYONE who want government involved.

You got to be pretty dumb to not realize by now that Cain's tax plans means
that the rich will be paying a hell of a lot less than 9% -
Since his plan will do away with the CAPITAL GAINS TAX and the ESTATE TAX
plus lower the Corporate Tax rate._________________Just Another Earthbound Misfit

~ It's About Being Able to Fly ~ ____________________________________________________
This is not a Hang Glider. It's a bunch of Hang Glider parts flying in a tight formation!

JJ your post described an emergency type service, (i.e. house is burning), are you aware that any hospital that was built with the help of Federal funds must take all comers in emergent care?

Most of the hospitals and just about all of the big research hospitals qualify for that obligation. I mentioned in a past post that in a private room right next to me was a young women who was on welfare receiving the same care and transplant services as i was.

All you need to do is go to a busy ER on a Friday night in major city and you will see tons of care delivered to sew up knife wounds and bullet holes from some of our uninsured citizens.

So I appreciate your analogy but it isn't relevant to the subject of this thread.

Not many people understand the complexity of health care delivery. There are many sides of the equation. Health care patients, Care Providers, Administration, insurance and cost control, and facility management to name the major considerations.

After considering these complex issues and looking at the talent base in Washington I don't understand why anyone and I mean ANYONE who want government involved.

Dennis

Our system of providing health care to the population is the most inefficient and expensive of all developed nations. If that meant that our citizens received the best health care as a result, then you might argue that it's worth the extra $$ we pay for it; however, we are ranked 37th in the world and well behind all those European countries that you don't respect. I guess at least you can say we're ahead of Slovenia and Cuba who rank #38 and #39 respectively. And not only do we pay way more for health care than everyone else, we still have 50 million uninsured, while they insure that everyone has at least basic medical coverage.

Jason, I did not mean to insult you by calling you a liberaló I assumed you were because of your wrong statement on taxes. And that is a very nice gun.

Here is the proof you've demanded, although it's one example of many to be found:

Between 1980 and 2007, the US cut tax rates on every form of income, the highest, the lowest and all those in the middle. The result was that the rich paid more, even if their tax levels were reduced. Letís take the top 1 per cent of earners. Over this 27-year period, their contribution to the income tax collected in America doubled from 19.5 per cent to 40 per cent.

JJ your post described an emergency type service, (i.e. house is burning), are you aware that any hospital that was built with the help of Federal funds must take all comers in emergent care?

Most of the hospitals and just about all of the big research hospitals qualify for that obligation. I mentioned in a past post that in a private room right next to me was a young women who was on welfare receiving the same care and transplant services as i was.

All you need to do is go to a busy ER on a Friday night in major city and you will see tons of care delivered to sew up knife wounds and bullet holes from some of our uninsured citizens.

So I appreciate your analogy but it isn't relevant to the subject of this thread.

Not many people understand the complexity of health care delivery. There are many sides of the equation. Health care patients, Care Providers, Administration, insurance and cost control, and facility management to name the major considerations.

After considering these complex issues and looking at the talent base in Washington I don't understand why anyone and I mean ANYONE who want government involved.

Dennis

Our system of providing health care to the population is the most inefficient and expensive of all developed nations. If that meant that our citizens received the best health care as a result, then you might argue that it's worth the extra $$ we pay for it; however, we are ranked 37th in the world and well behind all those European countries that you don't respect. I guess at least you can say we're ahead of Slovenia and Cuba who rank #38 and #39 respectively.

To take a rating without explaining the details of each factor distorts interpretation. My questions on this are...

Are any illegals included in in our ranking? You add 30 million running from object poverty to France and see what their numbers look like.

How much weight do they place on technology and high end health care delivery? As you can understand from my point I ask would I be alive today if i lived in Greece Spain or Norway?

I would be interested if we saw the rankings minus illegals and use a smoothing statistic like using only middle class income earners (take out the lower and upper class). We are capitalist country that is focused on middle class lifestyle.

JR...oned more thing...did you see this statement at the top of the link you provided?

"The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems was last produced in 2000, and the WHO no longer produces such a ranking table, because of the complexity of the task. "

I just saw that and it speaks to some of the points that i mentioned in my response.

BTW I am not saying we have a great health care system it has many flaws, it does not deliver services efficiently, the misspent dollars and overused exams and treatments are alarming. The lack of competition between providers and insurance companies allow for overcharging and corruption. The lack of a coordinated model reeks of bad distribution. In Boston we have two of the top 5 hospital delivery systems in the country and probably 4 of the top 25! Compare that to Charlotte or Kansas City which have similar size populations.

We can solve these problems without a government takeover I don't want my treatments decided by Pelosi or Boehner.

It's just one of those weird things that the most advanced nation that has ever existed on this earth is inexplicably incapable of doing.

Of whom do you write?

The only country that ever sent people to the mooooooooon!

Ah!
I wasn't mistaken then.
Personally I wouldn't have substituted "paid for Nazis to indulge their hobbies 40 years ago" with "advanced society" .
The USA admittedly has some extremely clever people living within its borders and the government is prepared to pay them to make very clever widgets that go bang. Does that make America an advanced society?
How does the USA's literacy standard stack up against, say, Kazahkstan?
Or the murder rate compare with.....Switzerland (where there's a gun in almost every house)?
There's a sizeable proportion of you guys who are infected with the meme of the "pioneering Western spirit". To you that means, "I'll look after myself and you can look after yourself, or not".
To me that means "We gained what we have by taking it off someone else and you ain't gonna have any of it. If you don't like it, talk to the gun".
To some, it's difficult to see that the USA actually subscribes to the notion of "society".
Ludicrously, the UK bought into the Friedmanite world view a while ago, and look where we are now: Totally f*cked._________________Hang Gliding:
If your Koch fails, you can blame it on tension.
CP Hill, CP Tow.
Moyes Malibu 188. Airborne Sting3 XC168

*offensiveness turned on*
this will save us money on so many things
1- greatly reduced healthcare costs
2- the military can do the shooting......think how much money we will save when US troops can now shoot brown (opps i meant uninsured) people in our own backyard......we don't need foreign bases and wars anymore

It's just one of those weird things that the most advanced nation that has ever existed on this earth is inexplicably incapable of doing.

Of whom do you write?

The only country that ever sent people to the mooooooooon!

Ah!
I wasn't mistaken then.

And feel free to read "the most advanced nation that has ever existed on this earth" as "the nation that fancies itself to be the most advanced to have ever existed on this earth". Because, y'know, we're also the only one that can do other stuff. Like provide healthcare that can keep people alive. Fat chance surviving in a place like Norway, Spain, or Greece. Or South Africa, where heart transplants were invented. Actually, come to think of it, one of the few times I've received medical care in the past 25 years was in Greece. I had no complaints._________________H4 + most skills
WW U2 145, WW UltraSport 147, WW Falcon2 170, PacAir Vision Mark IV 17
My HG wiki profile and my flying blog